Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

One way of approaching the question of nonnormative Indigenous genders and sexualities on lands claimed by the United States would be to seek to document the presence of such identities for a variety of peoples, attending to the differences among them as well as the complexities of change (particularly in the wake of Euro-conquest). There are classic studies that do such work (e.g., Jacobs et al. 1997; Lang 1998; Roscoe 1998), but Qwo-Li Driskill's Asegi Stories does something else. While pointing to archival markers of the presence of what currently might be termed Two-Spirit people in Cherokee history, Driskill reaches beyond that project of documentation to explore possibilities for renarrating Cherokee pasts, presents, and futures within what they term an “asegi imaginary” (99). While the term asegi is a Cherokee word that most directly means “strange,” Driskill observes, it is “being used by some Cherokees as a term similar to ‘queer’” and can serve as a means of indexing and recalling “those stories rendered strange by colonial heteropatriarchy” (6), and Driskill uses the phrase asegi aquadanto, or “strange-hearted person,” as a form of self-identification (4). Telling asegi stories involves marking and challenging the ways settler frameworks have sought to limit possibilities for Cherokee self-understanding and modes of relation, especially with respect to what can be characterized as forms of gender and sexuality. (Although, Driskill cautions, “One of the problems with some contemporary scholarship on ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ among Native people is often an assumption—unconscious or not—of the existence of these things we now call ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in the first place” [41–42].) The book offers a sustained critique of the ways colonial normativities have been imposed on Cherokee people and, conversely, the ways Cherokee people have sought to inhabit those norms, even if doing so served as a strategic means to protect Cherokee sovereignty. Driskill also powerfully explores potentials for restorying Cherokee peoplehood, historically and in the current moment, so as to increase capacities for engaging and affirming Cherokee modes of being and belonging that only appear “strange” from the perspective of colonially inscribed formations.In this way, the book is of a piece with recent scholarship in trans studies that seeks to explore in expansive ways the genealogical, ideological, and institutional conditions of possibility for contemporary configurations of gendered violence. Dean Spade's Normal Life (2015) and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides (2017) come to mind as the kinds of arguments with which Driskill's work implicitly is in dialogue. Those studies move outside of trans identity as such to address how technologies of gender making and enforcement broadly figured are constituted through the layered and crosscutting matrices of extant administrative networks and procedures (Spade) and the enfleshment of black people as fungible potentiality through which to make possible white becoming (Snorton). Driskill insists on the importance of attending to settler colonialism as a central formation of contemporary power, arguing, “Two-Spirit critiques point to queer [and also, implicitly, trans] studies' responsibility to examine ongoing colonialism, genocide, survival, and resistance of Native nations and peoples as well as radically engage with issues of gender and sexuality” (37). Native peoples cannot simply be added to analyses that themselves do not explicitly engage with settlement and the possibilities for Indigenous self-determination, and the first chapter offers an analysis of the ways contemporary queer studies either marginalizes Native peoples or appends them to conceptual and political itineraries that have little to do with Indigenous self-understandings and horizons of collective imagination and struggle. Reciprocally, Driskill consistently marks the ways that forms of heterogendered violence are crucial to understanding what settler colonialism is and how it functions, observing, “What scholars, activists, and artists are arguing is that homophobia, heterosexism, misogyny, and gender binaries are central to the invasion and occupation of Indigenous lands and the marginalization, genocide, and oppression of Indigenous people. Resistance, then, must centralize gender and sexuality as a central site of radical social transformation” (10–11).Chapters 2 and 3 address such histories of Euro-American domination and Cherokee responses to it. Driskill offers an episodic discussion of Spanish and English colonial engagements with Cherokee people from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, highlighting how “within dominant European worldviews all Cherokees were characterized as gender-nonconforming and sexually deviant” in ways that validated acts of aggression, murder, rape, enslavement, and the seizure of Cherokee territories (41): “Colonial heteropatriarchy maps gender and sexuality onto Indigenous bodies in order to find routes into and through our homelands” (89). Driskill then turns to Cherokee reactions to Euro-American “civilization” efforts in the pre-removal period—the first decades of the nineteenth century. Tracking changes in Cherokee political and economic formations that worked to centralize governance and institute patriarchal principles, Driskill shows how some Cherokees engaged in “a concerted effort to minimize Cherokee women's centrality to Cherokee community and culture, [by] attempting to ‘normalize’ Cherokee gender, sexuality, family, and marriage customs to correspond with dominant Euro-American models” and by “adopting chattel slavery and Euro-American styles of nationhood and governance” (114). These discussions of Cherokee history shift focus from the recovery of heretofore unacknowledged kinds of persons—historical actors that could be characterized as queer or trans—to the colonial politics of normativity mobilized against all Native people(s), that target Indigenous social systems as dangerously deviant and that give rise to Native normativities, which seek to blunt the force of settler invasion by adopting dominant Euro-American ideologies of sexuality and gender.The final two chapters, though, address how forms of asegi imagination vitally contribute to the survival and flourishing of Indigenous peoples. As Driskill notes in the Introduction, “While Two-Spirit critiques hold Native nations and people accountable for misogyny and homophobia, they simultaneously see Two-Spirit people and traditions as necessary—if not central—to national and decolonial struggles” (33). These last chapters further develop this claim through discussion of processes to “rebeautify and remake the erotic for all Cherokees” (137), exploration of the uses and abuses of notions of “tradition” in contemporary Cherokee discourses, and interviews with a range of Cherokees who identify as Two-Spirit or queer.Overall, the book aims to increase the capacity to envision and realize sustaining Indigenous lifeworlds while marking the centrality of gendered violence in historical and continuing settler efforts to constrain, erase, and eliminate potentialities for Native being and becoming. As Driskill suggests, drawing on a recurring split-cane basket metaphor, “we have to unweave the strands of stories that have created the cultural memories we currently carry” (102). The concept of asegi provides a powerful touchstone for the intellectual value of Indigenous nonnormativities in telling alternative stories to those naturalized as the real in dominant heteropatriarchal formations. Although it does not explicitly offer a sustained engagement with scholarship in trans studies, then, Asegi Stories can contribute significantly to such work in its foregrounding of settler occupation, Indigenous self-determination, and the gendered matrices animating both

Aesthetics · Art · Cherokee · Colonialism · Human sexuality · Indigenous · Literature · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Scholarship · Sociology · The Imaginary · Gender Studies · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Psychology

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